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Norman Mailer and The New Yorker

James Wolcott has a post up today about the relative lack of Mailer content in The New Yorker over the past six decades or so – Louis Menand’s pithy obituary notwithstanding.

Wolcott pulls a quote out of Mailer’s book Armies of the Night to help explain the scarcity:

Although [critic Dwight MacDonald] would not admit it, he was in secret carrying on a passionate love affair with The New Yorker – Disraeli on his knees before Victoria. But the Novelist [Mailer] did not share Macdonald’s infatuation at all – The New Yorker had not printed a line in review of The Presidential Papers, An American Dream, or Cannibals and Christians, and that, Mailer had long ago decided, was an indication of some of the worst things to be said about the magazine. He had once had a correspondence with Lillian Ross who asked him why he did not do a piece for The New Yorker. “Because they would not let me use the word ‘shit,’” he had written back. Miss Ross suggested that all liberty was his if only he understood where liberty resided. True liberty, Mailer had responded, consisted of his right to say shit in The New Yorker.

Wolcott notes that, these days, “all manner of shit is said in The New Yorker, and nobody minds, not even the senior nuns.”

(By the way, you can say “shit” in Q&Q.)

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